Is your doctor getting enough sleep?

December 10, 2012|By Milton D. Carrero, Of The Morning Call

Waking up in the middle of the night to work is hard, but it's much more difficult when you're dealing with matters of life and death.

I remember those days when my father was going through his residency program. When he was working overnight, my mother, my sisters and I would come to the hospital the next day to bring him lunch and to make sure he was well. It was a common occurrence. A great deal of the memories I have with my father happened in hospitals.

I must have subconsciously figured out my father's arduous work schedule because I often found myself needing stitches on days when my father was working late.

I remember trying to play with him, saying: "I can see you Dad" as he was stitching my eyebrow or my head after another fall from my bike. Many years later, I wonder if those moments were just coincidences.

Few people think about these things when they describe the life of a physician. Medicine has always been considered a privileged profession. Doctors earn good money, therefore they are expected to work long hours, sleep little and be infallible. Seeing the combination of these three aspects at play is the reason I'm a writer and not physician.

It is not uncommon for doctors in training to work long hours, sometimes as long as 30-hour shifts. A study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association sets more reasonable guidelines for residency programs.

The report, written by Dr. Kevin G. Volpp of the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center and University of Pennsylvania, showed that introducing five-hour periods of protected sleep for medical interns improved alertness during extended overnight hospital shifts. He examined 103 interns and senior medical students at the two hospitals to determine whether a protected sleep period of five hours is feasible and effective in increasing the time that interns sleep during overnight shifts.

After a year, the researchers found that those who were given the opportunity of protected hours of sleep used them. They were significantly less likely to have nights with no sleep. They slept a total of about three hours per shift, compared with about two hours for those who were not offered protected sleep hours.

The interns also wore wrist actigraphs to enable researchers to monitor their physical activity. They also kept a sleep diary. As expected, those in the group with protected sleep hours were less sleepy after on-call nights.

It is safe to say that an overworked and sleepy physician is more likely to make a mistake than one who just woke up from a nap and is looking at a problem with fresh eyes. If this statement applies to other professions, it certainly applies to medicine. Doctors are mortal beings.

To prove it, I'll share with you the results from this year's Medscape Physician Lifestyle Report. According to this survey, physicians are just as likely to be overweight as the rest of the population. They also drink more alcohol than the average person.

According a 2010 Gallup poll, 67 percent of American adults drink alcohol, a rate that has remained stable since this began being tracked in 1939. About 73.4 percent of male physicians and 65 percent of female doctors said they drink alcohol. To their credit, physicians also smoke less and exercise more than usual. The status of the doctor's marriage or relationship had the most impact in their level of happiness, according to the survey.